


You've Got A Lot On Your Mind

by thischarmingand (electricchicken)



Category: Limetown (Podcast), The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Crossover, F/F, give me bi Alex or give me death, podcast girlfriends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 15:01:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6524974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/electricchicken/pseuds/thischarmingand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Alex ran through the card catalogue of faces filed in the back of her head. Not one of the superfans, who kept trying to add her and Nic on Facebook, or the ever-expanding roster of ghost-hunters who mostly seemed to favour LinkedIn. And definitely not in any of Strand’s Black Tapes that she’d seen. “Were you at the panel earlier?”</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“Just got in a little while ago.”  She dug around in her pocket, did something with her head that probably looked subtle to anyone who hadn’t spent a lot of time looking over her own shoulder lately, and slipped a slim rectangle of paper into Alex’s hand.</i>
</p>
<p><i>LIA HADDOCK</i><br/>
Producer, Limetown<br/></p>
<p>(Or: Alex and Lia hook up in an airport Radisson)</p>
            </blockquote>





	You've Got A Lot On Your Mind

**Author's Note:**

> Set after episode 5 of Limetown and episodes ????? of The Black Tapes Podcast and Tanis. Let's be honest, who really knows what the timelines are with PNWS productions anyway.

_“There’s something very attractive about someone with a lot on their mind, isn’t there?”  
__—Deirdre Wells,_ Limetown, _episode 5_

 

“Obviously, with even a rudimentary remote controller—” Strand said, and whatever the rest of that sentence was supposed to be was lost under at least half a dozen groans and, from what Alex could see, three rolls of the eyes and two dismissive hand gestures. Barely even a three on the Dr. Richard Strand Annoyance Scale (trademark pending). She’d seen better at the hotel breakfast buffet, when he and Nic had gotten into it about the nutritional value of two per cent milk.

“…watch the tape again,” someone else — a long-faced woman with tight grey curls and a pink sweater that read as itchy even from five feet away — said. “Who brought a VCR?”

Alex lost count of how many hands went up at four.

“Are you coming along?” Strand was tall enough he didn’t have to crane his neck to look at her, even when surrounded on all sides by bodies. He’d been swarmed ever since the convention floor had opened, other than the couple of hours they’d spent on panels earlier in the day. For all that Audio Expo billed itself as a weekend focused on podcast creators, Dr. Strand was clearly the big draw. No one wanted to talk the reporter if it wasn’t going on air. Nic had slunk off half an hour ago with some of the gearheads to talk about sound mixing without turning a single head.

Strand raised his eyebrows at her, rest of his face still slack and neutral. The aloof academic, with just a hint of grumpiness around the mouth and a twinkle in the eye that ruined the whole effect.

_You’re loving this, aren’t you?_ she could have said. “I think I’m going to check out the bar.”

“Suit yourself.” He sounded almost disappointed. Maybe lecturing the true believers on apophenia wasn’t as much fun without an audience. Or maybe she wasn’t the only one wishing for a beer. Somehow, Alex couldn’t imagine anyone here opening up their mini bar after Strand had reduced their demon du jour to lighting tricks, video edits and mass hysteria.

She was half way back to the lobby when her ears caught Strand’s voice over the ebb of conversation behind her. “If you look at the evidence from a rational, rather than an emotional perspective—”

Only a one on the Dr. Richard Strand Scale of Annoyance, but yeah, she deserved that beer.

…

The bar wasn’t anything special — Audio Expo 2015 was running out of an airport Radisson, after all — but the draft taps didn’t look too bad for being this far away from the west coast. Getting close enough to the bar to order was going to be its own problem, though. Forget Strand, alcohol was winning the star-attraction award tonight.

Alex tucked her head down and shoved through the stragglers making small talk, drinks already in hand, aiming for the cluster of people closest to the bar. No sign of Nic, from what she could see of the room. Probably hotboxing one of the recording studios the convention had set up with the techies. She’d have to text him later, see if it was worth crashing—

“Alex, right?”

Too much time with Strand lately. She’d blame that for jumping when the hand landed on her arm. To her left a guy — bearded, bellied and trying to juggle three pint glasses and his phone — ducked back away from her elbow with a scowl, sloshing foam down his sleeve. On her right, the woman who’d asked her name was watching with just a hint of a smirk on her lips.

“Happens to you too, huh?”

Whoever she was, she was short enough that even Alex’s 5”4 bought her a few inches of height. Dark curls, mostly covered by a PBS ballcap, pulled low over her eyes. Freckles across her nose. Cute, Alex might’ve called her, if she’d wanted to sum it up fast. Familiar too, somehow.

“Yeah, I’m Alex.” She ran through the card catalogue of faces filed in the back of her head. Not one of the superfans, who kept trying to add her and Nic on Facebook, or the ever-expanding roster of ghost-hunters who mostly seemed to favour LinkedIn. And definitely not in any of Strand’s Black Tapes that she’d seen. “Were you at the panel earlier?”

“Just got in a little while ago.”She dug around in her pocket, did something with her head that probably looked subtle to anyone who hadn’t spent a lot of time looking over her own shoulder lately, and slipped a slim rectangle of paper into Alex’s hand.

She saw the red, black and blue of the APR logo first, nearly had the whole thing clicked together by the time she flipped it over to read the name.

LIA HADDOCK  
Producer, _Limetown_

Alex hadn’t decided what the hell to say to that when Lia shook her head. _Don’t blow my cover_ , coming through loud and clear. Okay, she could work with that. “You want to get a drink?” 

Lia smiled.

…

“I though APR made you pull out of this,” Alex said, bending low over her drink and trying to ignore the itch at the back of her neck. Half the people here had to be three pints deep already. No one was watching them now, but they might start if she kept swivelling her head around every other minute. “Strand sulked for two days when he found out he wasn’t going to get to tell you telepathy isn’t real.”

Lia laughed at that, and even though she’d tilted her hat up enough to show her eyes once they’d tucked themselves away at the back of the bar Alex couldn’t tell whether it was genuine or not. “You can say it — they grounded me.”

The cancellation announcement had gone out the same day Lia’s unauthorized, out-of-country interview with Deirdre had automatically downloaded itself to Alex’s phone. Nic had spent the next three days convinced he was taking home the spoils of Pacific Northwest Stories’ ongoing Lia Haddock Firing Pool.

“But you’re here.” Duh, Alex. She took a long sip off her pint to cover and rolled it over her tongue. Not as hoppy as she’d been hoping for. Midwest IPAs always pulled their punches.

“Well, they keep selling me plane tickets for cash at the airport.” That was a familiar smile. A little too big, a little too frozen. The ‘no, it’s not for the radio’ smile. The ‘let me explain what a podcast is, again’ smile. The ‘right, duh, of course demons don’t exist’ smile — and what did it say about how deeply weird her life was getting, if that was go-to example number three?

“So are you going to do a panel or anything?” She and Strand had some thing tomorrow about science journalism. Not the worst fit in the world. And it was hard to imagine any audience complaining about a chance to ask the infamous Lia Haddock a few questions. Alex could think of a few to start them off.

“Probably not,” Lia shrugged, circled a finger around the rim of her glass. “I just thought if I was going to spend the weekend drinking an entire hotel mini bar and watching HBO, I should do it somewhere with different scenery.”

That confirmed some rumours. “I guess I wouldn’t want to be living at home right now either if I were you.”

Lia finished a good third of her vodka soda in one go.

“Are your parents still—”

“Yeah,” clipped, but quiet, Lia’s fingers toying with her glass again. “I don’t really want to talk about them.”

“Right, sorry.” The seven million questions brewing in her mind about Emil Haddock weren’t likely to go over any better. Turn it around, take the pressure off. That worked in the field, sometimes. “I’m lucky —demons don’t really go for threatening phone calls.”

Lia didn’t snort, exactly. It was pitched too high for that. “Don’t give them new ideas for getting in touch.”

Unbidden, an image of Simon Reese’s face snaked its way across Alex’s frontal lobe. And there was a good thing about Midwest beers. You could get them down just as fast as the ones on the coast. “I feel like they’re doing fine on their own.”

“So you do believe it,” Lia said. Thoughtful, maybe a little surprised. The closed-off look she’d been wearing a minute ago was starting to fade, so that ought to count for a win, even if it didn’t feel like one. Maybe it would have been more satisfying if she’d been trying to get something on tape.

“I don’t know,” her turn to shrug, and the laugh that slipped out with it didn’t even manage Lia-levels of plausibility. “Maybe — I don’t know. It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Demons and unsounds and sacred geometry.”

“Hey, I did an interview on pig telepathy.”

“Yeah, but, at least you’ve got technology to explain it. Compounds and implants,” not that any of that had been enough to convince Strand, when she’d pushed the show on him during one of their road trips. “I’ve got old video tapes and glitchy bank doors keeping me up at night.”

“Have you tried alcohol?” Lia rattled the ice in her glass, and it took Alex a second to get her meaning. “I wasn’t really joking about drinking the mini bar. I haven’t been sleeping that well for a while either.”

She was almost smiling again. Not the best time to recount the night she’d woken up still drunk at 4 a.m. and mistaken a coat hanging on the back of her bedroom door for Sebastian Torres’ tall man, Alex figured. “Should I take that as a hint to buy us another round?”

“I can get it this time,” Lia reached into her bag slung over the back of her chair, rummaging around. “I’ve still got the company card.”

Alex debated the pros and cons of sharing the thought in her head, decided to hell with it. “My office has a betting pool for when APR’s going to fire you.”

“So does mine,” Lia said, pulling her wallet free of her purse. “I had Mark put me down for a month and half from now.”

…

“Seriously though,” Lia was leaning far enough across the table she must have been out of her seat. Close enough Alex had to duck sideways, slightly to avoid the bill of her hat. “Be honest — you and Strand?”

She didn’t spit her beer back into her pint, which was kind of a victory in itself. “His daughter’s older than me.”

“Since when does that stop people?”

“Okay, okay, fine,” she put a hand out to mime pushing Lia away, misjudged the distance and ended up flicking her ball cap over her eyes with her fingertips. “I maybe thought about it once or twice. He’s… not a bad looking guy.”

Lia did something that looked like it was meant to be a victory sign. “I’m telling Mark he owes me ten dollars.”

“Jesus, tell me you didn’t bet on that.”

“Uh, Lia Haddock Firing Pool?”

It was a good thing alcohol naturally pulled all the blood to her face. Otherwise, she’d be blushing by this point. “I wouldn’t actually do anything with Strand. Things between us are already — it’s all really complicated.”

“I guess a guy like that probably has a lot of,” Lia paused, just a little too long, and pulled a face, “demons?”

Alex groaned. “How long have you been holding onto that?”

“Not that long.” Lia sat back in her seat a little too hard, the change in motion wobbling the table as she went, rattling the empty glasses no one had come by to bus. If either of their drinks had been full enough to spill, they’d both have a lapful of alcohol now. “Complicated how?”

Right, that was why talking to other reporters sucked. Even drunk, no one ever lost a thread. “Where to start?” The way Strand went hot and cold — all in with _The Black Tapes_ one day, barking at her for ‘misrepresenting everything I stand for’ the next? The unanswered questions around Coralee? The impossibility of ever separating him entirely from the feeling of snapping wide awake in the middle of the night, certain she could hear someone scratching at the door— “Um, actually, can we not?”

She expected her to push. Nic, drunk, probably would have pushed. But Lia nodded. “Sorry. Do you want to get another round?”

Her panel with Strand started at 10, but she’d promised to meet Nic at the breakfast buffet by 8 to go over some Tanis stuff MK had forwarded him that afternoon. Something about Craigslist ads, or maybe real, pre-Internet-era classifieds. He hadn’t be really specific. On the other hand, it wasn’t like she was going to back to her room and sleep.

“Sure. My turn to pay?”

“I won’t say no.”

The crowd at the bar was thinning out, which meant the line was only five deep now. Alex sidled into the space behind a pair of guys in _HarmonTown_ tees arguing about what was either a list of increasingly hipster bands or a My Little Pony spinoff. Standing up, the beer was doing its job faster, lightness cascading up her frame to the top of her head, making her sway on her feet. Hopefully not enough to get any second thoughts from the lone hotel staffer behind the counter, though at a conference of geeks and journalists it was hard to imagine anyone getting that worked up about overindulgence.

She was halfway into Googling ‘The Crystalling’ (autocorrect had not liked that) when a snippet of conversation floated over the murmur of the room. “Lia Haddock, right?”

Even across the room, Alex could clock the guy as older. White hair made that easy. So did the cardigan. He was tall too, or maybe he just looked that way with Lia sliding down in her seat like that, shoulders hunched forward and head down. If she said anything back, Alex didn’t catch it, but the brim over her hat shook back and forth in a sharp, short _no_.

“No, I’ve seen your photo on the website.” Now that she was listening for it, the man might as well have been shouting. Drunk too, more than likely. A few heads at the next-closest table swivelled their way. “I listen to APR every day. I’m a valued donor.”

Forget the beer. Alex shoved her phone in her pocket and about-faced. Calm expression, not too fast. People never noticed a hurry unless you made them. Up close, she could see ruddy cheeks through the man’s neatly-trimmed beard. Confirmed for drunk. Confirmed for pretentious too, with a goatee like that.

Okay, what would a valued APR donor absolutely hate?

She pitched her voice high, slurred and full of vocal fry. “Ohmigosh, Cordelia, who’s your friend?” The man tilted back a step in surprise, enough space for her to slip between him and the table. “Come on, remember Brayden wanted to introduce us to those video game guys? I hear they’re having the hugest party up by the pool.”

There was a moment’s hesitation before Lia’s face split in an almost manic grin. “Buffy, you skank, you talked to Brayden without me? Let’s go.” She popped up from her chair like she’d been pulled, grabbed her purse and was siding out the opposite side of the table before the still-speechless man could get his bearings.

“Sorry,” Alex tossed over her shoulder, because old habits died hard, and followed her into the hotel lobby.

…

“Buffy?”

“Was that not where you were going with that reference?” Lia had ducked behind a fake potted fern near the lobby elevators. To anyone else, it must have looked like Alex was talking to a plant. A giggling plant. Lia tilted her head back against the wall and rubbed a hand across her face, but didn't quite take that punch-drunk smile with it. “Thank you.”

“No worries.” The guy had looked like a normal public radio wannabe, but Lia was still holding herself stiff, shoulders up, like she might propel herself straight out the hotel front doors on a moment’s notice. “You didn’t think he was one of,” she hesitated, trying to figure out what name to put to it, “one of them?”

“No,” Lia said, then said it again like she was trying to convince someone else. “I’m pretty sure whoever’s behind Limetown isn’t donating regularly enough to get our spring pledge drive tote bag and last winter’s pledge t-shirt.”

She didn’t sound convinced, but it wasn’t like Alex had a lot of room to throw stones when it came to paranoia. “You have tote bags?”

“Only for supporters.” Lia’s shoulders dropped a few inches. Not all the way relaxed, but better. “No free merch for staff.”

“Journalism sucks, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Lia half smiled, seem to think for a moment. “Do you want to come up and drink that mini bar with me?”

“You mean your room? Yeah.” She was going to blame how fast that came out on the booze, or the insomnia, or the tiny spike of adrenaline she’d been riding since inventing Brayden’s pool party. “Dibs on the $10 cashews.”

…

Alex couldn’t pin it down, but Lia’s room was somehow nicer than the trio PNWS had rented for her, Nic and Strand a few floors below. Made her feel less bad about all the shit she and Nic had talked about APR when _Limetown_ started taking over the podcast charts, at least.

With the door shut, Lia had lost the ball cap, revealing some next-level hat hair that, also unfairly, had sprung back to normal somewhere during Alex’s first scotch and soda. Now she was sprawled back across one of the beds (bigger than Alex’s, she was sure of it), shoes off and bare toes twisting in the covers as she attempted and failed to toss a minibar M&M into her mouth. It banged off her cheek, ricocheted and went skittering along the blankets.

Alex shrugged internally and ate it, before reaching over to steal a few more out of the container resting on Lia’s stomach.

“Hey,” Lia said, with no actual protest in her voice.

“Want me to write a thank you note to APR?”

“Just give me some of your cashews.” Lia reached out blind, eyes still on the ceiling, back of her hand flopping against Alex’s side. Her fingers opened and closed a few times, fingertips touching down briefly against her stomach.

“You can have the rest.” She passed over the tiny cardboard container (only $8 worth, and not even the size of her voice recorder). “Can I ask you something?”

“Okay?” Lia sounded more guarded than she had since they’d first sat down, and Alex’s heart squeezed in her chest.

“Why are you really here?”

Lia folded her arms across her chest, and it was probably just Alex’s morbid imagination that supplied the image of a body in a coffin, like some bad, old kid’s cartoon. “ I don’t know how to do normal any more.”

“Do normal?”

“I keep thinking about what Deidre said, after she told me about,” Lia didn’t trail off so much as stop, completely. “You know.”

“Yeah.” Even if she hadn’t listened, there’d been enough ‘did Lia Haddock know about her uncle?’ thinkpieces on _Salon_ alone to clue her in. Sometimes, Alex was glad PNWS didn’t get a lot of national media attention.

“Don’t let it break you,” Lia said, and they way she said it, Alex could imagine how many times she’d turned it over, said it out loud or in her head. Like a song lyric you couldn’t get unstuck, or a sound whispering at the back of your brain. “That’s the only fight you have. That's what she said.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Sometimes. I don’t know if that makes things easier or not.” She hadn’t moved at all since she’d started talking, and when Alex shifted onto her side to get a better look at her, Lia’s face was held as tight as the rest of her. “I was thinking, if I could get away from everything for a weekend…”

“What?”

Lia’s face twitched. Like a glitch in a streaming video. One quick movement, then freeze frame. “I’m so tired of being scared.”

She looked stiff, but when Alex reached for her hand, Lia went easily enough. “I know how you feel.”

“I know.” It still wasn’t much, objectively, but when Lia turned her head to look at her, Alex caught herself holding her breath. The colour had faded from her cheeks, the gleam when she’d laughed earlier gone too. Now, she just looked tried.

Alex was trying to figure out what to say next — what version of ‘it’ll be okay’ would sound the least untrue, coming from her — when Lia squeezed her fingers, said, “Do you mind if I kiss you?”

“Can you — oh. Yeah.” She should’ve been more surprised, she was pretty sure. But honestly, it made a few things make a lot more sense.

And, like she’d said, Lia was really cute.

A cashew crunched under Alex’s elbow when she leaned across the mattress. One more mess on the APR tab. Alex did her best to brush it away without losing her balance, which worked okay until Lia’s fingers found their way into her hair, gripping the back of her skull, and Lia’s mouth opened under hers.

For all that she was taller, Alex couldn’t say she felt like it now. Where she’d been shrunk in on herself most of the night at the bar, Lia Haddock took up a lot of space in bed. In the space of a couple of kisses, she’d roamed her hands all down Alex’s back, curled her legs up to bracket her hips with her knees. When Alex pushed her fingers halfway under her sweater, she arched up, ribcage rushing to meet her palm.

“Can I?” Alex asked. She hadn’t really decided what she was going to do with the permission, but Lia’s fingers were fidgeting with the clasp of her bra through her shirt, and that seemed like it kind of worked as a suggestion — and with her back still arched it wasn’t that hard to reach around dig her fingers into the band and pinch. Lia rolled with it, peeling it and her shirt over her head in a single go before pulling Alex back in to return the favour.

Jeans and underwear went in a scramble from there. Lia had the advantage here: Alex had to bend herself backwards to get at her socks, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to pull all the way away to do it, leaving her fishing for her own foot. Lia’s hands found her breasts, thumb stroking the curve underneath before her mouth followed along, pressing kisses up the rise before lingering over a nipple.

A sock came off in her hand. Alex wasn’t sure where she threw it. She’d gotten distracted by a slight hint of Lia’s teeth.

With one hand braced on the mattress, there was just enough room between them to run a hand down Lia’s stomach until she felt the brush of short-cropped hair against her palm. She was pretty sure she felt a nod against her chest, but she lingered a little anyway, getting used to the feel of unfamiliar skin, until Lia turned her face up towards her, nodded in a sharp, deliberate jerk before pressing another kiss to the base of her throat.

She was a little wet already. When Alex slid her hand lower, still just exploring, Lia let out a breath like a shudder against her neck, tension she’d been carrying around for the whole time Alex had known her, really, starting to slide out of her. She slid her thumb along the folds of Lia’s pussy, just enough pressure to gently part the lips without pushing inside, and enjoyed the way Lia’s face had gone softer, eyes drifting halfway closed. When Alex dragged her fingers along either side of Lia’s clit, caressing the shaft of it, she left out a small sigh and reached for her again, pulling Alex down into another kiss.

Even with the alcohol in her belly and the heat singing under her skin, she’d meant to go slow. Offer some comfort, or something. That wasn’t working so well. Not when Lia’s kisses along her shoulders and neck stung with small bites, and Lia’s body kept pushing up into her touch, until Alex’s fingers had nowhere to go but in. She was warm and wetter now and still pushy. “Add another.”

There were so many questions still going around in Alex’s head — blame the inner journalist who never shut up — _so are you bi too_ , _how long were you thinking about doing this_ , _you’re not recording now, right?_ She was definitely too drunk for half of them, but at least one still sounded good. “Can I go down on you?”

Lia ground down onto her fingers, breathed out hard. “Do it.”

She tasted good. Alex hadn’t quite gotten to that cotton-mouthed stage of drunk where she’d have missed that as she licked just shy of where her own fingers were still rocking into Lia, mostly steady in spite of everything. She moved her way up to her clit, until Lia’s hands were in her hair, twisting an unholy mess, and she had to pull away to catch her breath. Her head was swimming, probably had been a while, but panting against Lia’s thigh made it more obvious. Not a finesse job tonight, then. Okay. Broad strokes.

“Alex,” Lia tugged on her hair, and there was something in her voice that still sounded too much like ‘sick of being scared.’

Like she’d said, broad strokes. Alex sucked in another breath, offered what she could.

…

Her phone was buzzing. Alex cracked an eye half open, felt her way along the floor at the edge of the bed until she touched fabric, and hauled her jeans onto the mattress.

 

**Nic:** Alex

**Nic:** I’m hungry come out of your room

**Nic:** I’ve been knocking for five minutes

**Nic:** Alex

**Nic:** Shit Strand just came out and glared at me

**Nic:** Are you in there?

**Nic:** Alex

**Nic:** Alex?

 

He was still typing. Alex mashed the heel of her hand against her eye socket, trying to rub away sleep and the headache.

 

**Alex:** Overslept

**Nic:** OK

**Nic:** Let me in Strand’s staring at me

**Alex:** Can’t in another room

**Nic:**?

**Nic:** ?????

 

The glare of the screen wasn’t helping her head. Alex clicked the phone to black and shoved up on an elbow. The hotel room was dark and — yeah. Empty. Alex sighed, gritted her teeth and reached for the bedside lamp.

She’d dumped most of her clothing in a heap on the floor. Not far from the bed, thank God. Nic was still texting. By the time she’d gotten her panties and bra on, the phone had buzzed at least five more times. She wouldn’t be surprised if Strand was still staring him down.

A couple of M&Ms tumbled out of her tee shirt when she snagged it off the ground. No luggage, no clothing, no sign of another person except for candy and a half-empty glass on the other side of the bed. Would Strand consider that enough proof anything had happened?

Yeah, no, that was a conversation she didn’t even want to start imagining.

She made it to the elevator before she discovered the last piece of evidence. Nic had started texting rows of eggplants. Alex wondered if MK had told him about the emoji keyboard.

She was pulling her phone out of her back pocket to either respond or switch it off — she hadn’t decided which — when the slim rectangle of paper slipped out with it, fluttering to the hotel carpet.

LIA HADDOCK  
Producer, _Limetown_

There was new writing underneath. A phone number that didn’t match the APR studio line, and something else, pressed deep enough into the cardboard that she could feel the indentations Lia’s pen had left when she stroked her fingers over the surface.

_Don’t let it break you_.

She’d come back to those words a few weeks later, when Lia’s final episode went live.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
